1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of microprocessors, and more specifically, to floating-point units.
2. Description of Related Art
Use of floating-point (FP) operations is becoming increasingly prevalent in many areas of computations such as three-dimensional (3-D) computer graphics, image processing, digital signal processing, weather predictions, space explorations, seismic processing, and numerical analysis. Specially designed floating-point units have been developed to enhance FP computational power in a computer system. Many of FP applications involve computations of extended functions. Examples of extended functions are trigonometric functions, exponential and logarithmic functions, square root, reciprocal square root, inverse, divide, and power functions, etc.
Existing techniques to compute FP extended functions have a number of drawbacks. These techniques range from interpolations of values obtained from a table to iterative algorithms such as the Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC) technique. These techniques may require specialized hardware with dedicated circuits. They are typically expensive and not flexible to accommodate a wide range of extended functions.